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PARTISAN REVIEW
the cure. It is hard to speak of happiness when you refer to literature.
But in the stubborn resolve to give meaning
to
emptiness, to hit upon
the essential expression, there is a happy agony, if we can say that, a
privileged intensity, a force of the spirit seeking redemption, legitimacy.
Writing often helps me to rediscover a means to act, and it makes up for
some of the pointlessness that ages daily with us. Exile intensifies frustra–
tion to the extreme; writing comes to resemble a prayer, as I think
Kafka also said.
I don't think one can answer "in general" a question as serious as
whether writing justifies life from within. The answer is strictly personal,
after all; it comes from
within.
I struggled with this question when I was
in Romania. The moment I thought the price already much too high, I
left. In agreeing to pay any price, we open too many doors to hell si–
multaneously. Vanity wuld demand not only a more acute punishment
but a sorry mirror, a ridiculous and pretentious delusion. The very dig–
nity of our vanity demands, paradoxically, that we not pay any price.
An American Postscript, December 1994
PR:
You alluded to a campaign against you conducted by the Romanian
press in 1992. Would you explain? Is it still going on?
NM:
The reaction in the press was related to my essay, "Felix Culpa,"
on Mircea Eliade's relationship with the Romanian extreme right in the
1930s. The essay was first published in
The New Republic
in 1991, and the
next year it was included in my book,
011
Clowns: Th e Dictator and the
Artist.
Some American readers considered the essay too gentle, too
restrained, and too subtle; they wished that I had gone much further.
Yet, with few exceptions, in Romania this essay was considered a
blasphemy, and it provoked a huge and lasting scandal; it was a violent,
grotesque, and dark "carnivalization of blasphemy" which used such
delicate and elegant venerations as "traitor," "the dwarf from Jerusalem,"
"detractor," "Mr. Garbage," "policeman of the spirit," and so on, to
identifY me . As one of the leading Romanian literary critics remarked,
"Norman Manea's essay provided for the sudden and spontaneous
alliance of private citizens, public personalities, publications and
institutions promoting otherwise seemingly irreconcilable positions. A
thorough call to arms was sounded, and N .M. was almost unanimously
identified with the monster that assaults the 'great values of Romanian
culture'." The carnivalization has lasted for more than two years. Now
